AI Marketing Mastery: GTM Strategies, SEO Tactics, and Growth Trends for B2B SaaS

Hello, Harshit. Thank you very much for the invitation. Very happy to be here and share some thoughts and knowledge about marketing, AI. SEO and any other interesting topic you’re interested to talk about today. Thank you very much for having me and let’s have a fun conversation.

Okay. Okay. Absolutely. I’ll tell you a little bit of my journey. So My journey began in the vibrant world of B2C consumer marketing. I started first working with like global consumer brands such as L’Oréal Paris, where I focused mostly on like dermocosmetic products.
I was like immersed in understanding the consumer desires. I learned about the art of crafting messages that resonate. on a personal level with our clients and this experience actually like ignite my passion for creativity and brand development. But later, uh, seeking to broaden my horizons, I decided to join, uh, one of the biggest creative agencies in the world, which is Pulis group.

I wanted to get closer to where ideas are born and work closer with creative directors, and then. There I was working with some industry giants such as Nestle. There I learned a lot about like stories, storytelling skills and innovating like marketing strategies and how to scale global brands. But deep down, I have always had like a fascination for, for technology.

I’m Uh, such a geek and I really love like technology and innovation and that drive my curiosity. So I decided like to pivot from, from B2C to B2V and move to this dynamic world of software where I decided to delve deep In the tech sector, and now I’m specializing in AI, which I believe is transforming how everybody lives and work and joining atom has been like the perfect culmination of this journey.
And, yeah, I’m here in a place where I’m with cutting edge technology that meets transformative market, and allows me like my passion to work with, with technology.

Yeah, of course. So, um, yeah, I believe that one of the main challenges that I faced like at Atom is probably that. AI is like a very complex and rapidly evolving field. And, you know, like many of our potential customers aren’t even aware that they have like a problem that our technology can, can solve, you know, like people, like people are not aware of like the extent of AI and they don’t, they are still doing jobs and tasks that they don’t know that AI can automate and make them do like easier.

So I believe that the main challenge is in education, like we need to simplify the complex AI concepts and make them like accessible for all businesses and showing them that there’s a better and easier way to achieve their goals. So it’s about like bridging the gap between advanced technology and everyday applications and making the complex simple and demonstrating like tangible benefits for the users.

Okay. So specifically talking, uh, within the B2B industry and, uh, SaaS industry, I
believe that one of the main challenges that work the best is definitely content marketing and SEO.

That’s a channel that definitely proven to be very effective for lead generation, like it’s very important to create Content that provides value to the users. Usually when you are in business to consumer industry, the purchase has like a lower ticket. So buying a coffee, it’s a simple decision, right? But buying a 2, 000 software, It’s a very complex decision.

So in the B2B industry and in the SaaS industry, having a lot of content out is very important because people will usually take a very educated decision and they will take the time to search for information. And if you’re the one providing that information and you portrayed it in a easy to consume way, easy to read, That will drive traffic to, to your webpage.

It’s not always about like trying to sell and sell and sell, but also like to providing value. So you, perhaps you can create an article where you educate someone, or you can record a video where you educate someone. And after people go to your, to your channel to get that information, they will later get interest in. in your product. So that’s a great channel. And perhaps I would love to mention another channel, which I believe it’s key in the SaaS industry. And that will be LinkedIn, which is of course, it sounds very obvious. LinkedIn is the place where B2B business happens, but especially in within LinkedIn, uh, some strategies that have worked very well for us is like to empower people within our organization.

So not necessarily using your own company. LinkedIn page and just create content nonstop, but also helping the people within your organization to create content. So all the C level con C level managers should be creating content. The founders should be creating content. And if you are within a marketing team, you should be aiding Those people to create, to create content, perhaps you can help them do like ghostwriting and help them with the content, or you can just like mentor them and guide them.
But what LinkedIn’s do better is like, uh, they will give better results when the content is genuinely written by like another human. So that’s another strategy that has worked very good for us in this industry. Okay.

Okay. Okay. Well, yeah, retention is something very important. And sometimes, sometimes I believe it’s a little bit forgotten. Like most of the companies are so focused on the acquisition part. And then after you do the acquisition, then sometimes you forgot about the retention or you don’t, you don’t invest so much energy there, but actually when you look at the long term, when you analyse the lifetime, Retention is a key aspect of your business.

If you want to have like a really good revenue. So I believe that the first key part of retention, it begins in acquisition. And it means that you should, you know, like you should be very careful with the clients you’re bringing. So you want to actually bring. Customers that are within your ideal customer profile.

So if you sell cars and you bring a customer that’s interested in motorcycles, he will later leave your company. So the objective is like when you do acquisition, you want to bring people that are fit with your software solution. And that will help, um, in, in your retention, right? But also other small aspects within retention, for example, like a personalized email campaigns and in app messaging play a crucial role, like in the day to day to make sure you’re keeping your users engaged with, uh, with relevant updated information.

Social media is also like a powerful tool and it not only helps, helps your network, building like. Like the brand of your company and if people feel identified to your brand, they will, it will also help like in, in the retention.

Okay. So perhaps I will give you an example of another Campaign. I did a couple of years back when I was working for for B to C, but I believe it’s it’s a very good example of good marketing and how marketeers should think. And I believe it’s one of the main things that we should try to bring from business to consumer.
industry, we should try to bring that creativity to business to business. So back then I was working for, uh, for Nestle and I live here in Columbia. So you may know of you, or you’ve heard that coffee in Columbia is very dear to us. It’s a huge industry here. And it’s also like a very competitive industry, right?

Yeah. So, um, Nestle wanted to get into Columbia’s market with Nescafé. So Nescafé, Swiss brand, huge brand, everybody knows about it. And they wanted to get into Columbia, but it was very hard. Because the Colombian consumer, coffee is very dear to us, you know, and Colombians want to buy Colombian coffee. If you sell here coffee from other origin, people won’t buy it because we know our coffee is the best.

So they were facing this huge challenge. Like, how do we get into the Colombian market being a Swiss brand selling coffee in one of the biggest coffee culture countries around the world? So back then I was working in the creative agency. I was, uh, my job was to create a campaign, uh, that shift the mind of the consumers and we can actually make the Colombian consumer buy.

Colombian coffee. And the other challenge we had within, within that was the, the budget. So we had not a very big budget. So we have to do something impressive and disruptive with a very small budget. So the plan after careful thought with my team and with the creative directors that came up with the idea was to invest all of our budget in just one day, one campaign that will be interesting enough that will generate a lot of echo in all the digital channels, press, newspapers, and everybody will talk about it.
So basically we contacted, uh, the immigration, the immigration department of the airport here in Colombia. So we did a lot of public relations and somehow we connected with the airport officials and the migration, uh, immigration director of Colombia, and we convinced him. of changing the the stamp of the passports the stamp that will get into everybody’s passport for a new stamp which was made of coffee ink so the ink of the stamp was coffee and it smelled like coffee and everybody that get into Colombia Or out of Colombia that during that day, which was not any day, but it was like the international coffee day.

So to celebrate the international coffee day, we changed the stamps of all the airports with this new coffee ink stamp. And then we recorded how people arrive to the country and they smell the the stamp and after they cross immigration, then people will like offer them like a coffee like try Colombian coffee and the coffee that people will try will be actually Nescafe artisan coffee.
So then we recorded that and you know, even the president tweeted the the campaign because he was really proud of Colombian coffee. And that’s how we get to position a Swiss brand within like a Colombian like a Colombian coffee loving country. So what I want, you know, like what I want to highlight from that is that in the consumer industry, there’s a lot of creativity and we need to bring that creative spark to the software and business to business industry, because we are at the end, we’re all human and we like fun ideas and we want to relate with this type of initiative.

So part of what I want to do on one, what I try to do in my everyday. It’s like to make the B2B industry fun, relatable, and easy, easy to understand.

Okay. Yeah. So are, I believe, uh, like a prevalent misconception is that SEO is a one and done task, you know, like many people believe that once their website is optimized, they can just like set it there and forget it. And that’s not the reality, you know, like SEO is like an ongoing process that evolves when the search algorithm and user behaviour evolves, like people are constantly changing the way they type for their searches.

So that’s one of the myths that’s like a one and done task. And perhaps another myth could be that. SEO is solely about keywords. Like while keywords are important, search engines now prioritize user intent, content quality, you know, companies are also often expect immediate results. Plus SEO is a long term investment.

Like companies need to understand that if you change your keywords, it doesn’t mean that the next day you’re going to get a ton of traffic. It means that you need to be constant through time. And if you’re constant through time. And you have, you will have like sustainable growth over time. And those are like the two main big concept misconceptions.

Like you need to work on that and you need to understand is it’s a longterm investment, but if you do it. Right. And with patience, I’m a hundred percent sure you’re going to get like great, great results. And

Like, uh, marketing strategies or like messaging strategies, like

Okay. Yeah. So for, for ourselves, optimizing strategies, we’re constantly creating. So first we start by identifying our keywords, what people are searching for. So, you know, it’s for, for our case is very interesting because AI is very new for everybody.

AI is just like starting. And When you’re looking for AI product, if you don’t know about AI, what are you going to type in Google? What are you going to look for? Are you going to use the word? For example, chatbot, like we define our technology as AI agents, because we are connected and integrated to large language models, such as chat GPT or Gemini by Google.

So when you interact with these language models, like interaction is very smooth. That’s what we call an AI agent. Right. But perhaps all my consumers in their mind. They don’t know about these. They’re not educated enough to understand the difference between a chatbot, a linear chatbot, where you get the answers like one, two, three, four, five, like very long labyrinth of messages.

And it’s very confusing. That’s a chatbot. And the AI agent is the one that’s integrated with the large language model. So perhaps my customer doesn’t know that the difference between those two concepts. So I have to empathize with him. I have to get into his shoes and I have to understand like. What are they searching for?
How are they searching for? So that’s, we’ll start by there building the keyword, uh, the keyword list. Before the podcast, we were precisely talking about tools. So we use a lot of tools. Perhaps we can recommend SEM brush, or we can recommend Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. Or you can even use like the search console of over of.
Of Google or other tools such as like answers the public that will help you like understand what type of questions are people asking. So it’s not that you have to get everything from your own mind, but you can use all the tools that. Are there available to understand what people are looking for? Even if you go to Google trends, you can look, what are the trends people are looking for?

So you have, this is more about investigation. You have to do like your due diligence, understand what people are looking for first step. And once you get there. You start creating content, doing blogs, videos, putting up content in your webpage that educates people on whatever industry or topic you want to be like a professional and talk about.

So that’s like our main strategy.

Yes, that’s a very good question. Like that, I believe that’s like the next step, uh, in your sales strategy. Like once you’ve get the keywords and the technical sale and the right optimization for your webpage, you have to start looking for a backlink strategy. So you want third parties to write about you.

You can, there’s two ways. Uh, for doing that one way you can do it like organic. You can find someone that is organically interesting in your company, perhaps a magazine or a newspaper that wants to, in my case, wants to talk about AI and they can. Perhaps do a small interview or a small press note. And at the end, they will put the link of my webpage for people go and browse there, or that could be difficult.

In most of the cases, that’s difficult. You can also do like a paid strategy. You can actually contact the newspaper, you can contact the magazine and you can just like pay a small fee for them to write like a small press note about your And then what Google will do is that. You will get more authority because there will be like third party applications or sites talking about you and that builds reputation.

And that’s one of the key parts that Google uses in its own algorithm to position you and decide if you will go upper or downward within the, within the web page. So, so yeah, definitely backlink strategy is something you should be trying to integrate within your own strategy, strategy, if you want to get more, more authority.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, definitely I’ll have to talk about, uh, about AI because of course that’s, that’s my field, but also because that’s like the trend this year, everybody’s talking about that.
And the reason everybody’s talking about that is because this year is a pivot year. Like we actually reach a lot of people. We reach a lot of people. We actually reach A level in AI development that we’ve never been before. Actually, AI is now very, very helpful. So I believe, um, one of the biggest strengths will be like machine learning will keep like continue to revolutionize personalization.

Like all customers will be obsessed that everything will be personalized by them. Like the old approach of like being very broad and hoping that works. is not working anymore. And perhaps in this sale industry, I believe that’s something that’s another trend that’s going to be very important will be perhaps voice search.
Like people are using more voice channels. We already have a lot of technology from, speech to text technology, AI can now understand voice. So I believe one of the big trends will be a lot of people will be doing voice search. And also, you know, like there’s a lot of shift from people searching on, on Google.

That’s the traditional way. A lot of people, young people, Gen Z are now. Searching on TikTok, for example, and getting their answers, not in a text form as before in Google, but they want to see a small video that teaches them whatever they need to look for. So that’s another trend. And also within the LLMs, you know, like people are not searching now on On Google, but you can do the same search within the, yeah, within the JNI.
So if you are, but those are connected, because if you’re good positioning, Google, then the AI will look for the information within your own webpage. And you will be the one. giving the information to the LLM. So those are some, some trends I see, I see coming in the cell industry. Um, yeah, I don’t know, perhaps, you know, AR and virtual reality and augmented reality, those things are also something we are going to leave, uh, and it’s getting huge.

And in the next couple of years, I’m sure we, it’s going to become part of our day to day. All

Okay. So for me, like the constant evolution of marketing excites me, you know, like the intersection between Creativity, technology, and psychology.

Those are three fields I feel very passionate about. And I believe that marketing is in the center of those three and it offers endless possibilities. So I’m driven by the challenges of connecting audiences in meaningful ways and the satisfaction of solving like complex problems.

Well, I’ll have to say TikTok because definitely the video formats. Uh, I love it. And it’s a very easy way to connect. So I will say I will go for video and I believe TikTok algorithm is just like crazy good and it works very, very, very good. Okay.

Yeah, I’ll perhaps say. PR stunts, you know, doing something crazy that calls so much attention and it goes viral. Like at the beginning, I didn’t believe that could work, but I’ve later seen so many PR stunts that are so smart and so genius that go viral. And it’s a lot of risk, but a lot of real rewards.

So PR stunts will be the one I’ll choose. Okay.

I’m a really strong believer in brand Like, uh, my career began in brand and I believe that everything goes through your eyes and if you resonate with the brand is the most important thing.

So I’ll invest that budget in actually developing the brand, making my brand look very, very cool, very appealing. And actually in the B2B sector, that’s something very forgotten. Brands are sometimes very boring. While in the consumer industry, people love brands because they are very developed. That’s something we still need here in the software industry.
So I will spend my budget in hiring some very great creative agencies and getting my brand to tune up.

I believe that in this moment of my life, I want to learn more about sales. So sometimes marketers forget about that we are selling and, uh, I’m currently getting more information about sales. I will go to the day to day of a sales guy and then live his life for a day. getting the shoes of my customer, understand his needs.

So yeah, I believe sales are beautiful and sales are the core of most businesses. So go to the sales department and get my hands dirty and get some money and sell a lot.

My last Gen AI prompt was, uh, perhaps this, this same morning, uh, I was working for like a presentation I’m trying to get done for a webinar.

So I asked the AI to give me a full structure of what I needed to develop. I, Even put a couple of PDFs there of information I’ve, uh, already gotten before from Meta. I got a transcription of a video call I had with the product leader in the company. And with all of that information, I asked him to write me a structure of the presentation so I can grasp and have an idea of how I’m going to develop my next webinar.

No, Harshit, thank you for having me. It was a wonderful experience. And yeah, thank you very much. Hope to talk to you again.